Voting is Pointless because I have a strong-interest in Democracy

[Rhyfelwyr]

You can't have consensus based democracy unless you already have a large degree of homogeneity.

Exactly.

[Idaho]

The political process as we have it, is designed by those who benefit from it. It's a closed shop. The political consensus and agenda is set by the politicians and the media. Both of whom are completely paid for by the same, ever narrowing group of corporate interests.

Yes, now and again a target is taken down by the media. It's a token sacrifice. Sometimes the media takes a bigger bite. But we haven't seen any significant political change because of the media. Just a reshuffling of the same deck.

Politicians have been consolidating and centralising their powers for decades. We are more spied on than ever before. There are more people in prison. The police have powers of incarceration way beyond those they have ever had before. All this against a backdrop of a far safer society (it could be argued that this was *because* of these suppressions - but that is a different thread again).

I fear that people don't really want democracy. We are a species prone mainly to two destructive forces, laziness and despotism. Most people are more than willing to defer their rights to the few motivated despots. Politicians are the worst of us. Pvc, you have faith in the tory candidate for Exeter. I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire. Like all tories he is corruption waiting to happen.

Labour? They come from a more moral base, conceptually - to help poor people and not grind them into the ground. But they have sold out with Blair. Blair sold the party to the media and the corporations. He has his reward now. They are power and self justification waiting to happen.

Liberals are just incompetence and vanity waiting to happen. Useless twits.

Ukip are corruption, idiocy, vanity and power lust.

Green? Similar to liberals.

Left groups? Power and revenge fantasies.

The political process we have attracts the worst kind of person. Regardless of the political branding. We need to work on technology and philosophy that allows direct democracy and oversight without creating too much confusion and chaos. Our process is just a minor adaptation of that from the early victorian political compromise between the aristocracy and the rising industrial elite. Unfortunately this has now neatly fit into the requirements of the current economic elite.

I won't give my stamp of approval to this, nor will I try and join it. And I don't have the skill, motivation and economic strength to challenge it.

[HoreTore]

'Direct democracy'...? Could you explain what you refer to by that?

If it's an expanded swiss version(what 'direct democracy' usually refers to), I fail to see how binning compromise and turning every issue into a yes or no question improves our system.

As to being a candidate taking a lot of resources; it doesn't. Use a couple of your holiday weeks handing out stuff, and you're done. Do it by foot, and it's excellent exercise as well!

[Pannonian]

'Direct democracy'...? Could you explain what you refer to by that?

If it's an expanded swiss version(what 'direct democracy' usually refers to), I fail to see how binning compromise and turning every issue into a yes or no question improves our system.

As to being a candidate taking a lot of resources; it doesn't. Use a couple of your holiday weeks handing out stuff, and you're done. Do it by foot, and it's excellent exercise as well!

People who argue that their vote doesn't make a difference in the greater mass of things usually mean that they want their voice to have the decisive say. Basically direct exercisable power reflecting their thoughts, rather than an equal say to everyone who does care to have a say. They can't cope with the idea that their say does not necessarily prevail over others because they're saying it, but has to share consideration with others. Thus they dismiss everyone else as hopelessly tainted while their values are pure and untainted. That way they can get their say without having to face the responsibility of actually realising their arguments. Personally I admire all those past politicians who've made compromises with grubby reality to get their moral aims implemented. Lincoln is a wonderful film.

[Idaho]

@Pannonian - Heh. There is an element of that.

[Pannonian]

In my memory, there have been at least 2 independent MPs elected in England, one standing against corruption, one to highlight the NHS's issues, particularly hospitals in the candidate's constituency. If there are other pressing issues, no doubt other candidates independent of the main parties can be elected as well.

[Idaho]

In my memory, there have been at least 2 independent MPs elected in England, one standing against corruption, one to highlight the NHS's issues, particularly hospitals in the candidate's constituency. If there are other pressing issues, no doubt other candidates independent of the main parties can be elected as well.

The anti corruption candidate wasn't some average Joe. He was the senior political correspondent for one of the main tv channels.

The other was a doctor fighting an unpopular incumbent on a single issue platform of stopping the closure of the local hospital.

[Idaho]

Thanks @Seamus Fermanagh for support more eloquent and comprehensive than I deserve.

[Pannonian]

Idaho, I take it you're not interested in football. Or if you are, you're not familiar with the kind of thinking. Good times as well as bad. Support your team at all times. Do as much as you can to support them. You may lose, but the glory is found in the effort. There is even more glory to be found in making the effort when times were bad and hopeless.

I may not be able to make a difference individually (I'm not so much of an egomaniac to imagine that I matter more than 40 million other voters), but at least I'll make the effort. People better than me have struggled to gain the franchise for people like me. The least I can do in their memory is make use of it.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Idaho chooses not to vote because he already feels disenfranchised -- rendering the act of voting itself rather moot.

He is taxed by a government that does not spend all of those dollars on meaningful public works, but allows an inordinate portion of those taxes to fund programs that benefit a specific industry or segment of the polity without adding much to the greater good (or adding but only in the most indirect of fashions).

He is constrained by laws that criminalize personal vices which do no significant harm to any person simply because that criminalization conforms to the moral consensus prevalent half a century in the past. His personal freedom has be unfairly diminished without adding to the greater good.

The current choices for governance appear to be limited to parties who are either ineffectual, self-defeatingly reactionary, or (for the mainstream) whose primary concern is the maintenance of their own political power -- even at the expense or curtailment of the moral and intellectual goals that form the "spiritual" focus of that party's founding -- that they have discarded, effectively, their own raisons d'etre.

In short, he views the current UK politiculture as being divorced from relevance and either unconcerned with, and sometimes actively detrimental to, the greater good of the polity. The trappings, traditions, and procedures enacted by those in power (whether enacted by design or through the unthinking assumption that this modus vivendi was as it should be) serve only to reify the current state of affairs. He has been rendered politically mute -- disenfranchised.

Since he is unwilling to simply decerebrate himself with Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood (supply local equivalent as needed), he finds himself trapped betwixt and between. He is not uncaring or dulled enough to cease caring nor is he willing to blithely support the current state of affairs. The answer is a small personal "vote" for civil disobedience -- an announced active choice to not participate.



I do not think that maintaining such a stance is psychologically healthy. In the long run Idaho will have to:

1) conform, support whichever party has enough of a vestige of "greater good" attached to it in his eyes to make it the least unpalatable.

2) become a candidate himself, publicly voicing his assessment of the state of affairs as is and establishing his candidacy on a return to true support of the greater good as he defines it (can work, but most such efforts become quixotic)

3) numb himself with media, religion, poetry, drink or what have you (this was Baudelaire's answer: "One should always be drunk...")

4) opt out of the current environment entirely and move to a English-speaking quasi-frontier where politics is as close to functionally irrelevant as possible (small town Alaska, the Montana hills, Canadian NW, or.... [cannot resist, too delicious]...northern Idaho)

[a completely inoffensive name]

The political process as we have it, is designed by those who benefit from it. It's a closed shop. The political consensus and agenda is set by the politicians and the media. Both of whom are completely paid for by the same, ever narrowing group of corporate interests.

That is how it was for the US during the late 1800s, early 1900s and yet the Progressives managed to change it around through voting and government participation. During WW1 the US government locked up political leaders that spoke out against the war, I don't seem to recall that happening in the UK or US for the Iraq War. As I have said before, this response is a failure of the individual towards government and society in general because this whole mentality is not only that you can't make a difference but that people in general can not make a difference either (because they don't really want democracy amiright), which is a very unfair stance to hold. It just seems to be a stance that at its core is arrogant.

Cynicism is not wisdom, don't know what else to say.

[Montmorency]

Cynicism is not wisdom, don't know what else to say.

Cynicism purports to be the opposite of wisdom - that's the point.